Last Friday I met a girl in a wheelchair, in hospital. She had come for examination in a neurological ward because there seemed an outside chance that her condition might be reversed. Following a successful army career, this girl had decided to turn her recreational pursuit – equine eventing – into the main focus of her life. A few weeks later, she fell off a horse and severed her spine.

As a born moaner, I find it impossible to understand how a girl in her late twenties – so cruelly deprived of ambition and life-meaning – could be so cheerful in the face of that. But moving around the ward from one patient to another, she was (and remains) a shining light of hope encouraging others in that antiseptic region of forlorn reality.

Neurology wards are not places of abundant laughter. In this particular hospital, the ward is just a pair of doors and a few yards from oncology, a discipline further yet along the road to extinction. Along the corridor leading to this area walk patients with stark eyes and covered heads, often with the assistance of their partners, to sessions involving what medical euphemists these days call Nuclear Medicine. Looking at these people too, I am astonished and shamed by the commitment of the carer and the stoicism of the sufferer. The human being is an extraordinary animal in having awareness of disease and death, yet the courage to face both and damn them to Hell.

Tonight I watched as Rebekah Brooks stood, brazen and unrepentant before a phalanx of cameras, and raged at the legal system she has for so long ignored and cheated. She called the decision to charge her with perverting the course of justice ‘weak’, and told the assembled hacks of her anger at being victimised by those “whose only wish” was to waste public money on a prosecution that was bound to fail.

We must all draw our own conclusions from Mrs Brooks’s version of events, but the contrast between her ‘poor me’ analysis and the God-forgiving attitude of the girl in the neurology ward made me wonder yet again about the staggering spectrum of variation that represents  the species we choose to call humanity.

Chiefly, I mused upon the transient subjectivity via which we decide to denote one member of our species ‘talented’, another ‘mad’, and yet another ‘deluded’. For all three of those descriptions are dependent on the mores of the time.

Ten years ago, most people I knew in Fleet Street regarded Rebekah Brooks as extraordinarily talented. Six years ago, a majority of observers felt the predictions of The Slog to be mad. And today – I do not doubt – many people would regard the optimism of the eventer in the wheelchair as deluded.

Time, progress and cultural change make fools of us all. I would be prepared to bet that the cheerful girl in neurology may yet regain her mobility thanks to stem-cell research. Twenty years ago, my elder daughter underwent a cutting edge procedure to cure an inevitably fatal aterio-veinous malformation (AVM) in her brain. Its success seemed to my family a miracle. Today, the stereotactic radiosurgery used in that cure is an everyday procedure used in the harmless taking of biopsies from the brain.

But some things are always with us. Hope is one of them – and sociopathy another….although eventually the latter will be eradicated by the genetic screening of foetuses. We seem to me sometimes a weird species, trapped by our own travel and communications technology in the current state of development. However, it could be that what has happened to us happens to all species above a median IQ on all planets everywhere: that is, they become too clever for their own good, and arrive in a cul de sac of stagnation.

Perhaps that’s why – even though electro-magnetic lines could in theory transport us to anywhere in the universe instantaneously – the theoretical possibility of such travel has never resulted in obvious alien visitation here on Earth. Perhaps before it can, the frustration of smart-arsed species becomes too much for them to bear, and they blow themselves up. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that, unless we abandon globalist mrcantilism fairly soon, this fate awaits us too.

Or perhaps the Universe is an archeologist’s wet dream, just waiting for the first exceptional species to prove the rule, and thereafter discover it. What an infinite prize that would be.